Thursday, December 6, 2012

The contemplation of things as they are without error
without or confusion without substitution or imposture is in itself a nobler
thing than a whole harvest of inventions.

Francis Bacon On the Interpretation of Nature 1603-4Gustave Courbet

The state is incompetent in matters of art. When it
undertakes to reward, it usurps the public taste. Its intervention is
altogether demoralizing, disastrous to the artist, whom it deceives concerning
his own merit; disastrous to art which it encloses within official rules, and
condemns to the most sterile mediocrity. It would be wisdom for it to abstain.
The day the state leaves us free, it will have done its duty towards us.

...dissolving the artificial barriers that separated the
creative process from the life that nurtured it. “After a while you realize
that music—the writing and enjoying of it—is not off the cost of anything,”
[Tom Waits] said. “It’s not sovereign, it’s well-worn, a fabric of everything
else: sunglasses, a great martini, Turkish figs, grand pianos.” p.360

“ With the digital revolution wound up and rattling,” [Tom
Waits] wrote in a introduction to Hopkin’s 1996 book Gravikords, Whirlies & Pyrophones, “the deconstructionists are
combing the wreckage of our age. They are cannibalizing the marooned shuttle to
send us on to a place that will sound like a roaring player piano left burning
on the beach.” p. 414

From Barney Hoskyns Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits London
Faber & Faber 2009

David Hockney

...an art that’s not based on looking inevitably becomes repetitious,
whereas one that is based on looking finds the world infinitely interesting,
and always finds new ways of looking at ourselves. p.49

The source of creativity is love, the source of all
creativity. p.68

When the eye, the hand and the heart come together, that’s
when you get the greatest art. ... And the eye links to the hand, and the heart
gives the love. That’s where the creativity comes from – the heart. p.68

...the people who are really interested in your ideas will
find you. p.72

In abstraction, form is emphasized although the content may
have disappeared. In banal illustration, the emphasis is all on content with no
form. And, frankly, they are both a bit of a bore. The truth is that content
and form rarely merge and become one, and when it happens it’s magical art. p.98

Paul Joyce Hockney on Art Little Brown, 2008

W.B.Yeats

The Circus Animals' Desertion

Those masterful images because
complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

John Olsen

I find that the artist or poet is not in charge of the
destination of his work. p.45

...several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it
struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in
Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative
Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries,
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—Coleridge, for
instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the
Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half
knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than
this, that with a great poet the sense
of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all
consideration.

From Letter to George
and Tom Keats, Hampstead Sunday 22 December 1818